Some embodiments described herein relate generally to visualization tools for data centers, and, in particular, to methods and apparatus for navigating and monitoring data centers using advanced visualization techniques.
Some known visualization tools are used to display information for devices or components that are distributed across and physically located at different locations within a data center. Such known visualization tools typically implement standard navigation mechanisms such as list, tree or grid map. For a large-scale data center that includes hundreds or thousands of devices or components, however, such known visualization tools may not be able to fit every device or component in the available window dimensions. Representing and selecting a particular device or component of the data center using those known visualization tools can also be challenging.
Accordingly, a need exists for methods and apparatus that can both display the topological view of a data center based on a selected metric in a very condensed fashion and provide a method to navigate down to a specific area of the data center.